Over the past ten months there has been a change in blogging trends. The top five noticeable trends are firstly many blogs are starting to have multiple authors and contributors, this increases the amount of content and brings more variety to topics. This also opens the blog up to contain more subjects. A ‘mums blog’ for example is now being updated by the rest of the family and would typically contain more diverse content on the subject of family life. The second trend seems to be a social media trend, where blogs are being mashed up with other networks and communities, with users sharing their networks through badges and other forms of links, and even aggregating RSS feeds displaying their Twitter updates. Thirdly blogs are starting to look more like portals or magazines, merging with other sites to form their own social media content, this emergence of content can lead to a sites popularity to grow due to more links to the blog or topic. The fourth trend is that many bloggers are looking for alternative sources of income, this has lead a number to publish books or sell their knowledge for a price, launching DVD’s, Books, and audio downloads, boosts revenue more than Google ads. Finally many blogs are being started concentrating on specific niches, a specific hobby or interest, rather than in the early days of blogging in the early nineties when authors would blog about daily events and interests.

Search engines like Google and Yahoo have made it easier to find what you want but the internet is still an un ordered jumble of pages that makes finding anything useful a problem. Tagging content can help organize it into sections. Social Bookmarks use tagging as their primary way of organizing content, if every page or piece of content was tagged with words relevant to that information users would be able to find the information that they want quicker. Every piece of content can be tagged on the internet, Flickr make it easy to tag photos adding more information to photo and even tagging yourself or friends in an overlay that is only visible when you hover over the image. The value of tagging is only made apparent within a community of likeminded people who help to sort and clarify information. Information taken from Wikipedia (2008) states that many bookmarking services provide RSS web feeds for listings, and as these web services have matured and grown in popularity they have added more social features allowing users to rate and comment on bookmarks leading to users really deciding on what’s ‘hot’ and what’s not. This way of aggregating and organizing data isn’t new, the concept of sharing online bookmarks dates back to April 1996 in the middle of the ‘Dot Com Boom’ with the launch of ‘itlist’ within the following three years, bookmarking services became very competitive. StumbleUpon appeared on the market in about 2001 allowing users to discover, review and rate web pages. StumbleUpon is on the outset a web browser plug-in allowing you to rate pages as you browse the internet. Information taken from Wikipedia (2008) states that eBay purchased StumbleUpon, which at the time had an estimated 4 million members, in May 2007 for an estimated $75,000,000. Other social bookmarking sites include Digg, Slashdot, Reddit, Fark and del.icio.us.